Midwinter Transformation: A Poem

"Fresh Snow Chickadees," Robert Milner

A cold snap has hit the American east coast, including Maryland, and we are experiencing what Christina Rossetti calls “bleak midwinter,” with temperatures moving down into the teens. To cheer myself up, I turn to one of my father’s Christmas poems.

My father has been writing these poems annually for years. He sends them out in the family Christmas card and also publishes them in the Sewanee newspaper, which my mother founded and ran for years. In addition to being a fine poet of light verse, my father is an enthusiastic bird watcher, and the poem below combines his passions.

Seemingly straightforward, “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner” is about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn a cedar into a Christmas tree.   Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.

The transformation occurs “trysmegistically,” Hermes Trismegistus being an ancient messenger figure who moved between heaven and earth, opening up concourse between the mystical and the mundane. The poem describes the birds as angels, and one thinks of the Edmund Sears carol about Christmas angels “bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Here we see them “feasting and flying and doing a show/For watchers on the earth below.”

We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men” (and women): that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.

The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner

By Scott Bates

You can’t exactly call it greed
When birds at feeders feed and feed
On endless quantities of seed;

It’s sleeping in the cold all night
And doing prodigies of flight
That gives a bird an appetite.

They wait their turns with impatience
Perched on the cedar by the fence
Like so many Christmas ornaments,

Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee,
Turning it, trismegistically,
Into an ancient Christmas tree

With angels hurrying to and fro
Feasting and flying and doing a show
For watchers on the earth below.

From Merry Green Peace (Sewanee, TN: Jump-Off Mountain Press, 1995)
Illustration by Robert Milner at: www.artexperience.ca/prints.html